Require 3rd party age verification in shopify

Question

I have a requirement to do 3rd party age verification before I ship an order. I'm using a company called EVS for this. They released a shopify app recently, but seems partly baked. It requires a user to enter date of birth when registering for an account and then triggers the verification when the user places an order. The main problem with that is that it's rare for a customer to actually create an account before ordering for the first time -- instead they order first, then shopify emails them to create an account after the fact. Creating the account afterward does not allow the customer to enter DOB.

So I'm planning to implement my own solution. I can use EVS's API to run the verification by sending a combination of Name, Address, DOB, DL# and State, and last 4 of SSN. I have already built a proprietary order management system that pulls in customer and order data, and I can write a client to perform the verification.

I'm less savvy on the shopify side. I need to balance customer friction when placing an order for the first time, against having to do a lot of manual work for verification.

Below are the options I have conceived. Are there any other options? Any ideas for a better solution? Keep in mind I need to verify a customer once. I can tag the customer account as verified, and once verified it's business as usual.

1. Alter shopify templates to only show the checkout button when a user is logged in. If not logged in, show a "Create an account" button instead. That way the user provides DOB during account creation and the EVS app works as designed.

2. Set up a separate verification site like verify.my-domain.com. I can trigger an email to the customer upon order creation and ask them to verify. (May have issues with incorrect email addresses or spam filtering.)

3. If customer is not logged in, or account is not age verified, and they click Checkout, I can redirect them to a page. I can use a form on the page to do the verification. If verification passes, send them on to checkout.

For option 3, I don't know what shopify allows or what best practices allow. Can I use js to pass data to my own server on a different subdomain? Or post the form to another subdomain and then redirect back to shopify?

I'd appreciate any thoughts or suggestions.

Answer 1

You have pretty much summed up all your options, to clarify on them a little:

1. You can require that customers create an account in the store checkout settings. /admin/settings/checkout
2. This would work, you could iframe it in too on a custom Page. Or, better, use cross-domain calls or jsonp.
3. This is a little convoluted and you would have to persist and maintain lot of external state. I'd avoid this

I think a combination of 1 and 2. Turn on "require customer account". Modify the customer account creation page. Implement a cross domain policy with your server which will host custom code leveraging the EVS API.

I'm not sure if you are selling tangible goods or not but with stringent policies on users' age you have to bear in mind that shipping addresses could change. For a tight integration you should look at having webhooks whenever a customer is changed and make sure all their data is still valid since their last EVS approval.

Answer 2

I've been looking into this quite extensively and we've spent a number of hours experimenting with options. Our client in this case is on Shopify Plus so we do have the benefit of access to checkout.liquid.

Our research has led us to believe that one cannot pass the required 'customer note' of the date of birth to the checkout should they be attempting to checkout as a 'guest'. Perhaps because the 'customer' does not yet exist.

Our options have been narrowed down to:

1. Write a custom backend app that allows Shopify and EVS to communicate directly (XML API on the EVS side) in the checkout process or just prior and then pass the verification status back to Shopify to allow the order to proceed, or append some relevant status marker for the fulfillment department to act accordingly. The EVS app doesn't prevent the order from proceeding, but does flag the customer's age as unverified in the Risk Level panel in the admin. This would be quite a substantial project and by no means low hanging fruit. There is also risk of re-doing a lot of what the EVS app does already and running into they same obstacles they did.
2. Force customers to register prior to checkout (if not signed in). This seems the most viable approach. The only caveat being that existing customers will not have the customer note (birth date) and we'd need to build a smaller backend app to allow them to append this to their customer account via the Shopify API (this cannot be done via liquid).

These are our findings and I'd love to know more about how you ended up approaching this.